Diary Of A Wilderness Dweller

In the late 1980s, Chris Czajkowski left her truck at the end of a logging road 300 kilometres north of Vancouver and hiked for two days on unmarked wilderness trails to the site of what would become her home. This is her account of building three log cabins, an eco-tourism business and a life beside an unnamed lake 5,000 feet high in the Coast Range mountains. This new trade paper edition of Diary of a Wilderness Dweller shares Czajkowski's adventures from the beginning as she wields chainsaw and axe to forge a different kind of life.

At once a riveting adventure story and a testament to one woman's resourcefulness, Nuk Tessli is also a heartfelt elegy to the true wilderness and a cry for it's sensible use.

In the late 1980s, Chris Czajkowski left her truck at the end of a logging road 300 kilometres north of Vancouver and hiked for two days on unmarked wilderness trails to the site of what would become her home. This is her account of building three log cabins, an eco-tourism business and a life beside an unnamed lake 5,000 feet high in the Coast Range mountains. This new trade paper edition of Diary of a Wilderness Dweller shares Czajkowski's adventures from the beginning as she wields chainsaw and axe to forge a different kind of life.

Charming, humorous and utterly engaging, this is a book that will make readers laugh and cry. Written from the point of view and in the voice of the author’s dog, Lonesome, its observations of life in the wilds reveal a dog with great character, charm and attitude. Named for her first home, remote Lonesome Lake in British Columbia’s Tweedsmuir Park, Lonesome was a first-rate companion: obedient, mannerly, brave, yet occasionally cynical. She did not share her human’s love of the wilderness, and wore a martyred expression for most of her life. She would have much preferred a life in the suburbs, “with nice safe walks in the park and a cozy bed inside the house.” Lonesome’s memoirs paint a vivid and not altogether flattering picture of her life with Chris, but as she states, “I am not a vindictive creature and this book will remain family reading.” Lonesome loftily points out in her introduction that her book focuses on events not already recounted in Chris’s previous books, and she shares her unique canine perspective on their day-to-day life in the wilds.

It was ten years ago that this charming book first stole the hearts of dog lovers everywhere. Written from the point of view of Lonesome, a lovable dog of great intellect and character, Lonesome regales the reader with tales and observations of life in the wild. Named after the remote Lonesome Lake in British Columbia’s Tweedsmuir Park, Lonesome was a first-rate companion to her human—obedient, mannerly, and brave, yet occasionally cynical—although she did not share her human’s love of the wilderness and would have preferred life in the suburbs. Following in the tradition of classics like Old Yeller and The Incredible Journey, Lonesome’s charming, humorous, and utterly engaging memoir embodies the undeniable love and inevitable differences between a special dog and her human companion. With over 20,000 copies sold, TouchWood Editions is introducing this new anniversary edition so that Lonesome’s story can be enjoyed by a new generation of readers.

One of Chris Czajkowski's first priorities when she arrived at Nuk Tessli, a remote location in BC's Coast Mountains, was to devise a way to bake bread. At first, she lived in a tent and her oven was a simple pile of rocks with a hole in the middle. But as she built her wilderness cabins and started providing for the clients of her wilderness adventure business, she perfected her stone oven and her recipes--and word began to spread of Nuk Tessli and the "Best Bread in the World." From tangy sourdough loaves of freshly ground grain, Nuk Tessli Fruit Bread sweetened with hearty molasses and aromatic spices, to Montreal bagels with an alpine touch, here are inspiring, adventurous recipes that bypass the bread machine. Also included are quick breads and desserts, like a hearty trail mix cake--perfect on a hike--and Nuk Tessli's enigmatic spotted dick, plus a few indispensable recipes for any wilderness dweller (or frugal urbanite), such as fresh yogurt and sprouts. A Wilderness Dweller's Cookbook is not just a collection of recipes; it's also a fascinating account of how a wilderness dweller--in a non-growing climate 20 km from a road, 60 km from a store, and 250 km from a town large enough to have a supermarket--feeds herself and her guests. Of particular interest to readers with their own wilderness dreams will be Czajkowski's descriptions of the logistics of getting wholesome, fresh food to the table in this remote and spectacular location

Nominated for ForeWord Magazine's 2008 Book of the Year Award - Nature Category In 1988, Chris Czajkowski walked into British Columbia's Central Coast Mountains to build a homestead, a business, and a life. A Mountain Year is a beautifully produced art book full of original paintings, sketches and diary entries, offering an awe-inspiring glimpse into the life of this independent spirit and the landscape that she calls home. In this illustrated journal, Czajkowski intimately describes the splendour of seasonal transformation with her trademark expressiveness; each day brings new obstacles and surprising revelations. At the start of the year, she writes, "The night was bright with a silvery soup of moonlight refracted off snowflakes fine as stardust." Spring arrives with breathtaking beauty and summer brings company from abroad. In the fall, Chris travels back to her first autumn at Nuk Tessli when she views "an extraordinarily beautiful moment. The clouds hung low enough to almost touch the water . . . and a wonderful, bluish, pearly luminescence covered everything." Prepare to witness the magnificence of a year in British Columbia's high-altitude wilderness, a place of astounding natural beauty like no other.

“Fire Season both evokes and honors the great hermit celebrants of nature, from Dillard to Kerouac to Thoreau—and I loved it.” —J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar “[Connors’s] adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading.” —Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air Phillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a modern classic. An absorbing chronicle of the days and nights of one of the last fire lookouts in the American West, Fire Season is a marvel of a book, as rugged and soulful as Matthew Crawford’s bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, and it immediately places Connors in the august company of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, and others in the respected fraternity of hard-boiled nature writers.